Is this the most Scandanavian race ever?
I'm curious what people think about the new Roadblock rule. Teams are going to have to be very strategic about who does what. And at least one team is going to use its stronger member once too often just to survive, I'll bet. And we'll have to see some weakling scale a cliff or something.
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I didn't like the roadblock rule at first, but I like it more the more I think about it. Given that success on the race is more a product of your ability to get from place to place than to complete tasks quickly (or, more correctly, you can bleed a lot more time en route than at challenges), I think this rule really isn't necessary. Part of the reason it was instituted is that Chip, Colin and Brandon did essentially all of the roadblocks for their teams. But Christy and Kim did other things. You really never saw Chip with a map--Kim did all of the navigating. I think that team was more balanced than it got credit for. So my first thought is that this is an overcorrection.
On the other hand, anything that keeps another Flo (TAR3) from winning is a good rule. It forces both Racers to participate in the tasks, making it very difficult to win with a deadweight team member (can you imagine Nicole doing 6 roadblocks? She did one, that I can remember, and it nearly killed her. It also throws more thinking into the Race. Which cannot be a bad thing.
Is this the most Scandanavian race ever? Given that this is the only Scandinavian Race ever, I'm going to go with "Yes".
Wilhite
I'm sorry...but that sucked.
What were the f'in odds? Did she actually miss a bunch of clues? Doesn't seem like it. And they said there were more than 2 clues per person. Maybe they were attached to needles.
I liked the leg overall, but that's the sort of task where your lead should save you. Yeah there's some luck involved, but if you work hard you shouldn't lose more than two spots in the pecking order. And I'm pissed that the Mormons are gone because of it.
And I can't believe how many people counted. I mean...IKEA furniture. That should take you 30 minutes, tops. Especially with the pictographic instructions. A team of grad students would have been through that in ten minutes. Notice that the only building team that got out behind a counting team was the completely dysfunction one. Damn, but that seemed so obvious, and 5 teams didn't agree with me.
I didn't watch this until I got home from bar trivia, so you can see from the timestamp when I saw this episode. I know wish I'd waited, as I'm really annoyed.
I was going to post last night, but I was so frustrated I didn't even one to think about it. The Mormons were my favorite team so far, mostly because of the lack of squabbling or other screwups. It sucks they got eliminated for extreme bad luck, unless they did miss a bunch of clues but it didn't seem as though anyone else was having trouble seeing them. She was out there for like 4-5 hours before the last team even checked in. I also could not believe how many teams elected to count, and that Gus and Hera got lost. I don't think Gus was a spy; it just seems like they would run a far better race than he has so far. Of course, they came in 3 so it's not like they've been that bad.
Larry
They damn near got Philliminated in Norway by getting lost. So I don't know about "no screwups," Larry.
On the other hand they drove away in their own car. That was only a 30 minute penalty? Why didn't they make them wait off to the side? Maybe they weren't as entertaining doing so.
Admittedly, the old folks have been involved in a lot of the drama in the first three episodes, but judging by how much we're seeing of them, I bet they're going to stick around for a while. Based on how little we're seeing of them, I would speculate Gus & Hera are not long for the race. (Do they actually edit with an eye on the whole season, as my speculation assumes?)
True they did get lost in Norway, however M&M may have been pretty far behind them and it just looked closer due to editing. I'm not as sure about Gus and Hera. They haven't shown them much but they haven't been involved in anywhere near as much drama as M&M or the old people or upsettingly Jonathen and Victoria (if I had been racing I so would have yielded him so for fun). My guess is that they edit a little with the whole season in mind but try and make each episode as dramatic as possible, and Gus and Hera have not been involved in much drama yet.
I agree that they were one of my favorite teams, in that they were good to each other and the world around them. On the other hand, I didn't think they were outstandingly competent Racers. They did do a good job with the first half of the Norwegian leg, but were almost undone because of poor navigating right after a big bunching episode. And they were good in last night's episode, aside from the clue-in-a-haystack fun.
And I do think that must have really, really sucked for them. And I think that, if there'd been a clue out in the open while she was doing it, a camera would have shown it. But the odds of someone rolling out 100 haystacks withuot a clue being in one of them is ridiculously small. It's hard to figure what it is exactly because of the other teams coming and going and unrolling an undetermined number of haystacks (and the fact this is a probability without replacement). (25/27)^100 seems like a good guess for the upper limit on the probability. That gives her 1 shot in 2200 to unroll 100 without finding a clue. I think it's most likely that she unrolled stacks with clues in them, but just missed the clue, for whatever reason. This makes me feel a lot less bad for them. That said, it still sucks, and I was still disappointed in the finish. The grandparents should have gone in that leg. I think they are OK people, but it seems like every task is about to kill them. And they cry every time they finish anything.
As far as the editing tellng you who goes soon and who stays, I don't think that TAR is as obvious about it as Survivor is. Colin & Christy had been almost ignored by this point in TAR5, and they were a huge player in the last 10 legs. On the other hand, Chip & Kim got air time from the beginning. And Donny & Alison, who got a lot of play in TAR5.1, were out by the second episode. They tend to just edit based on what's interesting in each leg.
Wilhite
Just to start I'm a dork. Now that that's settled, I coded up a simulation with 270 bales and 20 clues with 9 teams and had the teams showing up at the following times.
Teams 1 and 2 at time=0
Teams 3,4,and 5 at time=30 minutes
Team 6 at time=1.5 hours
Teams 7 at time=1.66 hours (Hour and forty minutes)
Teams 8 and 9 at time=4 hours.
I assumed it took 5 minutes to unroll a bale so stepped it at that pace and just went through each team that was there starting at 1 through to 9. Then I ran it 5000 and 10000 times to see what would happen. Below is the table of who finished in what position how many times. Teams 8 and 9 finished last less than 80% (78.64 and 78.53 respectively) of the time, which seems a little wrong since they were giving up over 2 hours on the next closest team. Since the Roadblock was so close to the end of the leg assuming that the last team to find the clue is eliminated (time difference between last two teams to find the clue is was 4 out of the first 102 then I got tired of checking), that pretty much means that bad luck could knock out a team that at least a 2 hour head start. In summation, I am a dork.
Larry
team 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
1 2062 963 585 456 356 258 182 64 74
2 1936 1137 569 440 351 261 161 76 69
3 360 1003 1184 897 593 440 285 124 114
4 322 937 1136 1010 609 428 331 114 113
5 319 903 1156 913 680 505 316 100 108
6 1 33 243 770 1229 1299 865 295 265
7 0 24 127 510 1147 1457 1105 305 325
8 0 0 0 3 17 175 899 1927 1979
9 0 0 0 1 18 177 856 1995 1953
team 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
1 4128 2015 1146 904 649 509 363 160 126
2 3864 2246 1128 940 661 527 374 137 123
3 711 1950 2321 1829 1253 883 608 208 237
4 662 1883 2319 1783 1280 942 662 245 224
5 629 1787 2288 1922 1332 919 641 246 236
6 5 89 488 1506 2481 2580 1735 555 561
7 1 30 310 1112 2269 2911 2117 610 640
8 0 0 0 2 41 365 1784 4036 3772
9 0 0 0 2 34 364 1716 3803 4081
I forgot to say there were no missed clues in my sim.
Just to start: Larry is a dork.
It's interesting that the third-place team finished last abot 2% of the time.
Wilhite
I thought--and I don't know why--there were about 200 bales. Did they say something like that? Or did they say "over 200"?
He definitely said 270 bales and 20 clues.
Wilhite
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